A Year in the Words of Others (iii)

May

He puts down the glass, his fingers brushing against the flowers. He stands and crosses the room to the window where he can see slices of the street between the blinds. He is foolish and deluded, coming here thinking he could say these things to her. He must be mad. What kind of response did he expect? He is ridiculous, but still wants to say to her, it’s not inevitable, if you take him back he will only do something worse, can’t you see he doesn’t value you, and what am I to do when you are gone, what shall I do with this weight in my heart and why did you have to infiltrate me like this.
Maggie O’Farrell, "My Lover’s Lover"

 "All of man’s unhappiness comes from an inability to stay in his room alone," said Pascal, advocating a need for man to build up his own resources over and against a debilitating dependence on the social sphere.
Alain de Botton, "on Love"

 Closer to God is the one who’s in love
And I walk away cause I can
Damien Rice – The Professor & La fille Danse

Bewildered and exhausted by grief, I suffocated on question marks, symbols of the mind’s attempt to understand the chaos: "Why me? Why this? Why now?"  I scoured the past to look for origins, omens, offenses, anything that might count as a reason for the unreason that surrounded me, something to act as a balm for the wound I had sustained, something to link disparate events, a pattern I might superimpose on the random dots and dashes of my life.
Alain de Botton, "on Love"

Love wants to shout itself from the rooftops but in equal measure wants to be secret–both to proclaim itself to the world and take shelter against the world, to be herald and prophet, hermit and mute. It is that way, too, with persons of Emily’s and William’s age: The self that they are not busy disclosing they are busy concealing. Perhaps on that account they are seen to be deceitful when in fact they are merely protecting and conserving from profanation what is sacred and meant to be unseen and unsaid.
Robert Clark, "Love Among the Ruins"

If dreams are like movies, then memories are films about ghosts.
Counting Crows – Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby

The longing for a destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life. All too often forced to share our bed with those who cannot fathom our soul, can we not be forgiven if we believe ourselves fated to stumble one day upon the man or woman of our dreams? Can we not be excused a certain superstitious faith in a creature who will prove the solution to our relentless yearnings? And though our prayers may never be answered, though there may be no end to the dismal cycle of mutual incomprehension, if the heavens should come to take pity on us, then can we really be expected to attribute the encounter with this prince or princess to mere coincidence? Or can we not for once escape rational censure and read it as nothing other than an inevitable part of our romantic destiny?
Alain de Botton, "on Love"

Everything good, I deem too good to be true
Everything else is just a bore
Everything I have to look forward to
Has a pretty painful and very imposing before
Fiona Apple – O’Sailor

 
June

Unrequited love may be painful, but it is safely painful, because it does not involve inflicting damage on anyone but oneself, a private pain that is as bittersweet as it is self-induced. But as soon as love is reciprocated, one must be prepared to give up the passivity of simply being hurt and take on the responsibility of perpetrating hurt oneself.
Alain de Botton, "on Love"

        Jesus, I wondered, what do you do with a pain so bad it has no redeeming value? It cannot even be alchemized into art, into words, into something you can chalk up to an interesting experience because the pain itself, its intensity, is so great that it has woven itself into your system so deeply that there is no way to objectify it or push it outside or find its beauty within. That’s the pain I’m feeling now. It’s so bad, it’s useless. The only lesson I will ever derive from this pain is how bad pain can be.
Elizabeth Wurtzel, "Prozac Nation"

 Well I’ve been here before
Sat on a floor
In a grey grey mood
Where I stay up all night
And all that I write
Is a grey grey tune
So pray for me child
Just for a while
And I might break out yeah
Pray for me child
Even a smile
Would do for now
Cause I’m all alone again
Crawling back home again
Stuck by the phone again
Damien Rice – Grey Room

A periodic insomniac myself, I said, "Some nights it seems my brain is someone else’s TV, and they won’t stop channel surfing."
Dean Koontz, "Brother Odd"

A life, Jimmy. You know what that is? It’s the shit that happens while you’re waitin’ for moments that never come.
The Wire, Episode 34.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. I was supposed to be an exotic little American princess, a beautiful and brilliant bespectacled literature student reading Foucault and Faulkner at my rolltop desk in my garret room with hardwood floors, full of whimsical plants and chimes hanging from the ceiling and posters of movie stars from the forties and bands from the sixties on the slightly paint-chipped ivory walls. There were going to be lots of herb tea and a beautiful Mediterranean hookah and paisley cushions and Oriental rugs on the floor so that I could run my own bohemian salon from my guileless little love pad. I wanted a futon with a thick crimson-colored bedspread where I could make love endless nights through sleepy mornings with my boyfriend, a guy who had grown up in Connecticut and played lacrosse and the guitar and me, and who loved me with naughty desire, respect, and abandon.
Elizabeth Wurtzel, "Prozac Nation"

Those boom times went bust
My feet of clay, they’ve dried to dust
The red isn’t the red we painted,
It’s… just… rust
And that signature thing that used to bring me following
I have trouble now, even remembering
Fiona Apple – Tymps (The Sick in the Head Song)

I can’t take my mind off of you
I can’t take my mind
My mind, my mind
‘Til I find somebody new
Damien Rice – The Blower’s Daughter

This is how to become
old — worry only
about yourself.
So that if there come
bombs out of clouds
or lovers into rooms, saying
goodbyes, learn
how to cup your hand around it, as if
in a world of wind
there is this one candle
that must be saved.
–William Greenway, "Heart"
 
A history, like a life, is just what one person chooses to remember.
Leah Stewart, "The Myth of You and Me"

Some friends don’t understand this. They don’t understand how desperate I am to have someone say, I love you and I support you just the way you are because you’re wonderful just the way you are. They don’t understand that I can’t remember anyone ever saying that to me.
Elizabeth Wurtzel, "Prozac Nation"

One can imagine one’s own future archaeologist making a terrible mess of it. Trying to explain you, he fills and fudges where he must, and all of your nuance and detail–which is precisely what makes you you–is lost or imagined, replaced by the nuance of your chronicler instead. Your virtuous behavior, your generosity or bravery or acts of humble gratitude–if there is no record of it, it did not happen. And if there is instead a record of something else–a momentary lapse, a persistent rival’s well-recorded lies, an angry lover’s obsessive, unilateral collection of correspondence, a detective’s confident miscomprehension of a smudged dossier–what will your hapless excavator say of you? . . . And this is why one must be careful to leave one’s own truth behind oneself, honest but unambiguous, loose ends snipped off. . .
Arthur Phillips, "The Egyptologist"

 
July

The land whooshed away from me as we traveled along at sixty miles an hour, and I couldn’t help but think this sensation not unlike the writing of a memoir: one attempts to write forward in time, keeping to a reasonable chronology, all the while trying to seize the past as it speeds by and recedes into the distance–finally disappearing at the vanishing point.
Anita Shreve, "All He Ever Wanted"

The one thing I can tell you is that you wont survive for yourself. I know because I would never have come this far. A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body. As for me my only hope is eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart.
Cormac McCarthy, "The Road"

It is so hard to be alone and yet so hard to be with others, to speak the truth without doing injury, without unraveling the net of memory–of the sweet and delectable past, but also of slights and secrets set aside, of bonds we wish had never been made–upon which all our affections rest.
Robert Clark, "Love Among the Ruins"

    "If you remember the first time you saw Alma, you also remember the last. She was shaking her head. Or disappearing across a field. Or through your window. Come back, Alma! You shouted. Come back! Come back!
    "But she didn’t.
    "And though you were grown up by then, you felt as lost as a child. And though your pride was broken, you felt as vast as your love for her. She was gone, and all that was left was the space where you’d grown around her, like a tree that grows around a fence.
    "For a long time, it remained hollow. Years, maybe. And when at last it was filled again, you knew that the new love you felt for a woman would have been impossible without Alma. If it weren’t for her, there would never have been an empty space, or the need to fill it.
Nicole Krauss, "The History of Love"

Noah Fishpost, MD, in his captivating books on the adventures of modern psychiatry, Meditations on Adromeda (2001), mentioned one had to proceed as unobtrusively as possible when questioning a patient, because truth and secrets were cranes, dazzling in size yet notoriously shy and wary; if one made too much noise, they’d disappear into the sky, never to be seen again.
Marisha Pessl, "Special Topics in Calamity Physics"

If there was a better way to go then it would find me
I can’t help it, the road just rolls out behind me
Be kind to me, or treat me mean
I’ll make the most of it, I’m an extraordinary machine
Fiona Apple – Extraordinary Machine

And so it is
Just like you said it should be
We’ll both forget the breeze
Most of the time
Damien Rice – The Blower’s Daughter

Men need two things: the love of a father and the arms of a woman. Otherwise, they’re screwed.
Marcus Sakey, "The Blade Itself"

When I had journeyed half our life’s way
I found myself in a darkened wild,
for I had wandered from the true road.
Dante, "The Inferno"

Now that mine is almost over, I can say that the thing that struck me the most about life is the capacity for change. One day you’re a person and the next day they tell you you’re a dog. At first it’s hard to bear, but after a while you learn not to look at it as a loss. There’s even a moment when it becomes exhilarating to realize just how little needs to stay the same for you to continue the effort they call, for lack of a better word, being human.
Nicole Krauss, "The History of Love"